


Lionfang Week Day 2: Warmth

by Eriakit



Series: Lionfang Week 2020 [2]
Category: Warcraft - All Media Types, World of Warcraft
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Death-Seeking, Depression, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Metaphors, Minor Character Death, Past Character Death, that moment the depression cycle lifts yall know the feeling, too many probably
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:22:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25415377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eriakit/pseuds/Eriakit
Summary: It's been a very, very long time since Saurfang's felt warm, and Anduin might as well be a living bonfire.
Relationships: Varok Saurfang/Anduin Wrynn
Series: Lionfang Week 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1837615
Comments: 15
Kudos: 26
Collections: Lionfang Prompt Week





	Lionfang Week Day 2: Warmth

**Author's Note:**

> I've decided all these prompts will be in the same AU. For best results please listen to Hayden Calnin's "Warm With You" on repeat while reading :D

The first thing Varok had been told when he came to Northrend was that the cold never _really_ leaves you, especially not the cold that sinks into you in Icecrown. He’d doubted that - any cold could be vanquished. Enough sun, enough ale, enough bodies pressed in tight to yours, enough long, lazy afternoons in Durotar, and one could forget any cold they’d ever experienced. It was miserable, surely, but it would fade in time.

Except it never did.

Northrend’s cold _clung_ to him, oozing in around his bones, sapping the strength from his limbs. Every breath was like a knife up his nose and down his throat and into his chest. Touching anything that wasn’t covered in fur felt like grabbing a hold of death itself, like it sucked the very spark of life from his spirit. It creaked, and crackled, and shifted, but it never _left._

At first, he could dull the edges of it. There wasn’t much sun, but everyone, regardless of rank, huddled close to the fires when they came inside and sucked down enough ale - and stronger - to warm their bellies. More than one drank more than they could stand through, seeking the warmth. No one judged them. It could be them, the next time.

And then, Icecrown. He had thought the cold couldn’t get worse. He had thought that his skin would numb, his nerves deaden. But Icecrown was a cold like no other, and it felt as if his hide was creaking from it every time he moved, like his eyes would freeze in their sockets if he failed to move them enough. It felt like his heart would freeze over, a thick gloss of freezing death over pulsing muscle.

It finally did as he held Dranosh in his arms, his boy’s alien, abhorrent armor digging into his chest, the spikes pressing ice through flesh and bone to find his heart and finish encasing it.

He’d tried to warm himself, after. He’d tried, and he’d failed - alcohol skipped his heart to warm his stomach, and just made him queasy if he managed to drink enough to, even briefly, forget. The press of other warriors around him only made the cold worse, seeping out from his heart to steal the air from his lungs at the thought of who _wasn’t_ among them. Once-fond memories of holding Dranosh when he was small twisted themselves into nightmares about the horror of pressing Dranosh to his chest and hearing only the cracking of ice. The sun only blinded him and made his head ache to match his heart, and the dry air of Durotar only made him cough.

The Banshee Queen turned an entire city, an entire _island,_ into a bonfire, and all he felt was the sick drag of sadness to pair with the chill in his chest and the exhaustion in his arms. Lordaeron was cold on it’s own, he found, but it couldn’t compare to what radiated from inside of him. The cells beneath Stormwind leaked tepid water, but were at least warmer than the Undercity had been.

But then the tiniest king he’d ever seen was once again needling at him, pressing eager fingers into the tender spots along his soul, digging into every sore spot and shadow of shame. Varok wanted to kill him. He _planned_ to, but then stopped himself as he had a realization.

The tiny, human king’s probing questions and impassioned speech carried _hope._ Endless, boundless hope. Where betrayal and loss had stuck into him like jagged slivers of ice, Anduin Wrynn poured in warm hope like sticky honey and sunlight. He almost-hated it, felt that familiar, prideful disdain for assistance creeping around the edges of his spine - but there was something about the human. Anduin Wrynn could no more restrain his hope and his light than a clear, cool lake could stop sustaining the life around it.

Varok betrayed himself more every moment he stood in the little king’s presence. He drew too-close, traded barbs too-fondly, lingered too-long in nonsense topics instead of examining the situation at hand. Epithets turned to surnames, and then he was trekking through the wilds like a hunted boar as he sought allies and it was all too easy for him to write _Anduin_ and not bother to correct it. Ink and parchment were hard-won treasures for an outlaw, after all.

That it laced flaming filigree over his ribs and up his throat to see Anduin’s next letter call him _Varok_ shouldn’t have had any bearing on the mistake repeating. But it did.

But the days nights alone were dangerous and chilled him anew every dawn as he looked towards his eventual death. He was under no delusions - he would most likely die, the only real question was where. In a soggy, insect-ridden swamp that often froze over just before daybreak? On the bright, unforgiving, hard-packed dirt in front of Orgrimmar’s gates? Perhaps back in a cell, either Horde or Alliance, a traitor or a monster who didn’t deserve to die standing? His only solace was when the last of the heart left his body he could join his son, and maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t feel the cold in his heart if it took over his whole body.

Except - he didn’t die. 

Fellow fools gathered in sad, forgotten clusters of stones, and he felt more warmth reach his fingertips from watching them glower at maps than he had clustered shoulder-to-shoulder beside burning braziers in Northrend’s tundra. His face flushed with it as his tiny, light-filled human brought dissenting hotheads to order. The frost around his bones cracked as he marched beside them, sharply enough he felt it should have been audible.

Thrall, as always the cleverest idiot, knew his plan as soon as Varok did. He held Varok back by the shoulder before he could challenge Sylvanas, and strode forward with all the peace of a man with a thousand times less to lose. And as Thrall’s body lay withered and Sylvanas ran from her disenchanted masses, Varok could only, shamefully, wish he’d stepped forward faster. It would have been kinder than the ice growing harsher, thicker, tighter in his chest, worse for having cracked apart in the glare of Anduin’s hope.

The sun shone over the funeral, hot enough the air in the distance blurred and tears dried as they struck the coarse sand. Sweat coated his brow, ice filled his heart, and again he wanted to hate the human standing quietly at his side. But then a delicate, gloved hand brushed his shoulder, and cold hate melted under the concern written on Anduin’s face.

Varok internally blamed the heat for offering to show Anduin the city. He had nothing to blame but himself for the creaking of thawing ice that filled his ears as Anduin smiled and accepted, or how his blood ran warmer when Anduin returned from a brief trip into the rooms Varok had shown him were his for the duration of his stay wearing at least two layers less. He felt overdressed, overwhelmed, a stuffy heat he’d thought forgotten in his ganglier, younger years stealing what breath fit in his lungs around his cold heart. He stripped his gloves and pauldrons off and strode out of the Hold before he could think too hard about why.

But Anduin kept pace, and Anduin gazed so delightedly at all the things Varok had used to feel warm fondness for, and Anduin was _just_ the right kind of eager to have random, stupid words spilling out of Varok’s mouth as if all that ice inside him that Anduin had melted had to find a way to flood outwards. Varok felt like a bloom desperately angling himself towards the sun, like some idiot clefthoof bull displaying for a cow, a prancing bird showcasing its bower. Yet he couldn’t stop, not when every corner they turned had Anduin’s eyes widening, his toes pointing to lift him higher.

Anduin was like a minuscule sun. Varok hovered, not daring to touch a live flame, until concern overrode self preservation. His fingers _burned_ when they touched Anduin’s back, but before he could choose to lean into it or jerk away, Anduin was pink-then-red, stammering out excuses and not wanting to halt their moment of reckless shirking of responsibility. And oh, then they were trading fragile, hopeful barbs, and _oh,_ Anduin was _laughing_. 

It was an explosion, goblin powder and sparks, right in the center of the ice in his chest. His focus shifted, the glaze of frost over his eyes falling away. Varok was suddenly more aware of himself than he’d felt in years, more aware of the scents of hot food and warm animals of the city, the grind of stone under his feet, the gleam of crystal in the canyon walls catching the sun, the pressing noise of life around him. He didn’t quite catch the words his own mouth made in the sudden rush of reconnection life, but the tiny, bare hand on his arm sharpened his focus like a blade run through his gut.

Anduin pleading with him to use his given name struck another blow, and Varok nearly shook from it. It felt like something had snapped within him, somehow in a good way, and the blank frigid glaze of minutes before had been scraped off with hot sand. He felt like he should be panting. But instead he grinned, wide and helpless, and spent the rest of his evening basking in the blistering heat of Anduin’s presence.

With distance, that night, came what the ice had kept from him. Pain and grief raged hot in his gut, and he ripped a thousand-thousand fragile things apart in the safety of his fantasies and memories as he glowered at the ceiling and carefully didn’t-damage the Wachief’s chambers he’d been unwillingly shoved into. But it felt healthier - an infection in his soul cooked away, rotten flesh cut from him with a hot blade.

Just before dawn, nearly convinced he’d exhausted himself, he stumbled into a new series of thoughts - of leeches and lampreys, of sucking the warm lifeblood from another that seemed so full until they shriveled, unable to continue sustaining you. The new concern roiled in his brain and twisted his guts. His skin crawled. Was that all he was? Some parasite, feeding off of the warmth and hope and joy Anduin brought to him, sure to drag them both down?

But then a servant knocked at his door. The girl brought food, seasoned in near-lethal troll fashion, and hot water. And Varok found his eyes watering from the heat of the peppers, and his toes flinching away from the near-boiling water in the tub, reacting like he hadn’t in years. He waved off the servant as he felt the tears begin to spill, and finally cried as he submerged himself to clean up for the day ahead.

No. He wasn’t a leech, nor a thief - Anduin had given him, somehow, the gift of feeling back. Given him a speck of warmth, and somehow set off a chain reaction that changed so much, so quickly, that Varok was left gratefully, confusedly scrambling in the melted remains of himself and his floodplain of grief.

He dried himself, stuffed more of the eye-watering roasted meat into his mouth, and made his way out into the heat of the city. He had a Horde to put to rights.

**Author's Note:**

> Please direct all screaming to the comments section, and feel free to re-read day 1 to get the fluffy feelings back :D


End file.
